This Blog as Resource

There are many times when I come across something and wonder if I have dealt with it or have information about it. One such occasion occurred very early this morning, when I heard voices outside my house and looked out a window in my hoffice (home office), to see a moving van. It had "Father & Son" written on the side, and that sounded familiar. I wondered, 'Is that the company that turned the big yellow building near the DMV into a giant billboard?'

By the time I got to the window with my camera, a door had been opened on the truck, which took away the "Father" part of the writing. But the "& Son" is still visible.

So I logged into this blog on Blogger and searched for "billboard". Sure enuf, "Father & Son" is the company at issue. This foto appears at my post of November 14, 2010.

As blog owner, I have better search capabilities than the casual visitor, going back to the very beginning of this blog in 2004. But there is a Search box at the top left of this blog that produces posts from at least the last 18 months or so for any search term you type there. If you type "billboard" and hit Enter, you will indeed get the relevant post, but not first, in this instance, because there is one, more-recent post that includes the word "billboard". Once Blogger has produced all the posts it is going to produce from a search term you type (and you can usually tell when that has happened, because a different post from the current one will appear on the first screen, unless that search term happens also to occur in the current post, in which case nothing will seem to have changed. However, instead of the immediately prior post following the very first post onscreen, the first post before that which includes your search term will appear. Once all the posts that include that search term have been assembled by Blogger, you can then do a Find (Ctl-F) to jump to each occurrence of that term, e.g., "billboard".
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I refer to this blog often for my own information, since I cannot carry in memory all the details of all the items I have covered. For instance, my friend Joe from Belleville last week sent me link to a story about a minister from Paradise Baptist Church, at 15th Avenue and Hunterdon Street, being carjacked, and I knew that I have seen that church, because it is at a corner at which the #1 bus turns, and I could picture the arc of lettering over the church entrance. But I didn't know if I had taken a picture and put it onto this blog. So I searched, and found that no, I had not, but in a post about myself being harassed by police, I found reference to that same pastor being indignant that Booker's police were harassing other elderly people, in his congregation. So my understanding of life in today's Newark was deepened by comparison of a present-day news story to an old story involving the same minister.
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You too may find useful, information in this blog's archives, either directly, thru the Search box atop this blog, or by means of a search engine. Indeed, sometimes, when I cannot, even with my expanded search capabilities as blogmaster within the Blogger software, find what I'm looking for, I can find it thru Google with a search string that includes "newark usa", such as "billboard frelinghuysen newark usa". That string produced the right post as the third result.
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Some people have wondered — even to the point of seeming to complain! — why my blog appears so often in search results, esp. in a Google image search. There are various reasons for that. First, this blog has been online for almost 7 years (since May 11th, 2004). Second, this blog is visited by a lot of people, tho few read it regularly. Some skim it and look at the pictures, which is fine with me, because by now I am almost as much a fotografer as writer (or propagandist, an honorable term, as I regard things, since my writing propagates truth to people who haven't heard it). Third, there aren't many other webpages or blogs that cover Newark extensively. Thus, even if you left off the "usa" part of the sample search string above ("billboard frelinghuysen newark" [dropping "usa"]), my post of 11/14/10 still comes up 18th. With "usa", 3rd; without, 18th.
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(As I write, it is SNOWING! Tamara of Newark Pulse mentioned snow to me by email last nite, but I didn't know what she was talking about. Jeez. I sent this little email to my sibs, who are located in the Houston area of Texas; Las Vegas, Nevada; and Long Beach (L.A. County), California — weathersissies, all:

FRIDAY, it was 80 degrees, and the ice cream man was driving down Smith St. This morning, at 8:50, it is snowing, big fluffy flakes, and the temperature is 36. Don't you miss NJ?

Too muckin' futch.